Ben Affleck's son had a playdate with Prince George

“I can now tell Sam that he got a cold from the King of England!”
- bySimon Perry

04 Nov
2016

When Ben Affleck took his four-year-old son Samuel to an indoor play centre in London earlier this year, he wasn’t expecting a royal run-in.

“I noticed this weird vibe from the other grownups,” the star, who was filming the upcoming Justice League at the time, tells Graham Norton on BBC1 in an episode airing tomorrow evening.

“They were all very well dressed and they had earpieces and I thought, ‘For a kids’ place this is tight security!’ I was the very last person to realise that Prince George and Princess Charlotte were in there playing with my kid.”

Unfortunately, a case of royal sniffles ensued, said Affleck, who appeared on the talk show to promote his new film The Accountant: “I can now tell [Sam] that he got a cold from the King of England!”

Affleck said he wanted Samuel and daughters Violet, 10, and Seraphina, 7, to “see all the sights”—but despite heading to Windsor Castle, the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace, they “didn’t see one royal” in what might be thought to be the usual places.

And when they went to see the famed changing of the guard in London, their view wasn’t quite what he hoped.

“Now if it was in America—and I hate to admit this—you’d get a VIP pass. You’d get backstage and they would accommodate you.

"So I got a tour guide thinking this guy will accommodate me but that wasn’t the case!

“He took us to the middle of the street but we were so far away not only couldn’t we see the guard, we couldn’t see the fence!

"We were surrounded by 50,000 tourists looking for selfie opportunities and we never saw the guards change! It was a disaster!”